In 2008, poet Marianne Boruch took the unusual step of attending a medical school anatomy class. It meant spending long hours in the anatomy lab, where they keep the dead bodies.

“I wanted to put myself into an unusual situation, one that might be terribly unnerving,” Boruch said. She was 57. “I wanted to surprise myself, to reach, to dig deep. I wanted to put myself in a spot for which I had no plan, really, no agenda.”

She applied for a Faculty Fellowship in a Second Discipline from Purdue University, where she has taught in the English department since 1987.

She got the fellowship, so on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays during that fall semester, she and 16 new medical students would spend two hours listening to lectures on anatomy and then two hours in the cadaver lab.

There Boruch bonded with one of the cadavers. It was the body of a 99-year-old woman. It had blue eyes. Later, Boruch wrote poetry through those eyes, and on Thursday, she, along with some medical students and student poets, will read from “Cadaver, Speak,” her eighth poetry collection, published last spring by Copper Canyon Press.

Will Higgins: Is a cadaver an “it,” or is a cadaver a “her” or “him”? What’s the right pronoun?

Marianne Boruch: I think they deserve their personhood, still have a clear right to it. We should honor that. Gender is a huge part of who we are — or were, yes?

WH: Describe what you felt when you saw the face of your first cadaver.

MB: The fact is that in the lab, the heads were wrapped up in wet towels most of the term. We dissected every other part first. There we were, staring down into the most private parts of the body, dismantling them for weeks — the pelvic regions, for instance, usually completely covered. But now it was time to unwrap the heads. They were astonishing, haunting and oddly gorgeous. And it struck me: What we think of as the most public part of the body is actually the most private part. Meaning: The face is the most individual thing about us. It was a most poignant and moving moment to see them. “They look like Renaissance drawings. So beautiful ...” says the stand-in for me in the poem, dubbed “The Quiet One” by my speaker. Of course, my cadaver, in quoting me, wryly disdains that take. As usual, she thinks I’m delusional.

WH: You said in an earlier interview the old woman “pretty much pushed me aside, insisting that she be the speaker” in the poetry. Are you suggesting something supernatural happened?

MB: When I started writing, I was at first the speaker, the standard poet-in-the-dissection-lab-tells-her-story sort of thing. But that trick got old and seemed way too self-absorbed. Because it wasn’t really MY story, was it? She was my favorite cadaver, of those four. I know she reminded me of my grandmother, who meant a great deal to me. At any rate, it wasn’t at all supernatural or weird. Somehow — and this was a gift — I felt an unearned connection with her. And once I gave the reins to her, to be the speaker of that poem, everything went electric. I tried to create a figure who was smart, wry, tender, surprising. And to do that, I had to step back and let her just talk. I kept my distance. After all, I was the only one in the lab she didn’t like. (She was fond of the students and the teacher — go figure!)

WH: Did you do any actual dissecting, or did you only observe and take notes?

MB: I jotted down things I heard and saw in a small notebook tucked in my lab coat during dissection lab. But after each four-hour class (Gross Human Anatomy was a 12-hour-a-week course), I went home to my journal and wrote down what happened, things that astonished or unnerved me. This is not my usual habit as a writer, but so many extraordinary images and realizations were coming at me, I had to devise a way to recall everything as clearly as I could. And what did I do in class besides observe? Occasionally, I was invited to handle the lancet or the forceps. At such times, I was like that kid Tom Sawyer allowed to paint the fence a little.

WH: What did the cadaver lab smell like?

MB: My speaker — the oldest cadaver of the four dissected who narrates this sequence of poems — comments herself on this. Among other things, she refers to the fact that “the air in this lab/the thing they talk talk talk of/I already said: not great./ And it sticks to their scrubs and their hair ...” Sorry, you just have to imagine it. It’s pretty untranslatable.

WH: What do you make of the fact that your performance of “Cadaver, Speak” in Indianapolis is scheduled for the night before Halloween? Do you find that in any way cheesy?

MB: Yes, it is most definitely a bit cheesy. I’d much rather do it any other month, or at least not so close to that haunted and jubilant day. But we had to schedule around major exams of the medical students, who make up roughly half of my readers. (I will read the opening and ending piece, and they will do the rest.) But I suppose there is reason to be hovering about aloud on this date — November first is All Souls Day, after all. And October 31st is also the famous Mexican “Day of the Dead,” when those lost to us are honored. I hope that is what we are doing for my cadaver: celebrating that she was on the planet at all, and that she reminds us of the vital things we all share — joy, rage, embarrassment, curiosity, discovery, love.

Call Star reporter Will Higgins at (317) 444-6043. Follow him on Twitter: @WillRHiggins.